Considering that I love to learn and plan on sticking myself in institutions of higher learning for the next several years, why is it that yet again, school is causing me to fade? High school killed the me that I once was. As a college freshman, I was still a burnt out shell of a person, bitter and depressed. As a sophomore, I had a year of recovery and progress, renewing myself ... but this time around as a junior, it's like I'm somehow making the same mistakes and starting to constantly feel the same way as I did by the time I made it through high school. This pointless misery makes me sick, yet it is so hard to climb out of!

The feeling is like the dream where you are flailing, trying to run through Saran-wrap. You expend an incredible amount of effort for very little, slow gain. You can't get anywhere fast enough to make anyone happy.

Last semester was pretty blah, and although the beginning of Spring 2004 was okay, the blahness is starting to return. Something, at a variety of levels within my consciousness, has faltered. I cannot work as I wish to, some drive is lacking, while this useless tension fills its place. I can't write (I'm sure you've noticed this one). I am convinced that my life is mundane, halfway on the edge to worthless. I feel unfocused, useless. I have a letter on my desk about my unsatisfactory 3.38 GPA ... and it doesn't inspire me to work any harder. Fear about it tightens my body, but can no longer propel me forward.

I will never find you.

...

Roomdraw is coming up ... and I've been fairly withdrawn on the subject with my roommates. (The four of us live in a "quad," four singles and two bathrooms attached to a larger common room.) Though I've been quiet, in reality I'm fairly frustrated that the others insist on having single rooms if at all possible. To me, it seems like taking unnecessary risks, needlessly courting a year's worth of perpetual irritation.

Roommates happen. Living with annoying people happens. Learning how to put up with it happens. You've never spent semesters with a roommate, and I have. I've been through three of 'em, two of these were bad, and one was good. Based on my experience (which does include two people with a lot of stuff trying to fit into the smallest dorm room on campus), I would rather avoid disaster and stay with people I know I get along with.

Single rooms on campus = hard to come by, double = standard. We are in the Quad by sheer luck alone. Therefore, let us avert disaster by rooming together. If I wind up giving in on the Woods apartment issue, I would feel ... wounded, in a way. Let me condense all my complaints about that complex into a single sentence: I don't feel safe there, and I don't think I would be happy.

Overwhelmed, tired, andconstantly reminded about your "terrible" GPA, it's frustrating. Fo me I guess it's more so that I felt I was letting people down,t hat those standard I'd set for so long were eating away at me.

The Quad setup you're living in sounds like as good a deal as any to me considering you get single bedrooms. I'd have loved it. If you get on each other's nerves it's easy enough to seek refuge, but when living in a one room dorm with another person, now that's fun. Roommates...ah, the memories. I've had several that were horrible: the cowgirl who brough a cat home at the end of the year and kept the litter box by her bed, the girl with chip on her shoulder because we did not "bond", the anal retentive business major, the with the boyfriend problems who cried a lot (although aside from that she was an okay gal). Maybe your current roomates should listen to some horror stories before they take this risk.